THIS week we have another big challenge when we come up against the Sydney Swans.

We trained at night during the week in preparation for Saturday night’s game, just to get the body clock ready for the match.

It’s something we’ve started doing during the year in the lead-up to night games.

Even at the start of the year we weren’t doing it but I think a couple of players floated the idea and the coaching staff thought it was a good idea.

It seems to be working pretty well. We couldn’t have asked for any more against Melbourne last week.

We’ve spoken about it over the last month and we just want to keep the foot on the pedal and not flirt with our form at all.

Sometimes it can be a bit tough to get up for certain games. Last week one might have thought we didn’t have much to play for. We were up against the bottom side, it was cold and wet and there weren’t many people there.

But the guys were just sensational all night, and Bomber was really happy with our performance.

Now, we’re pretty much in the same position as last year. It’s virtually impossible for us to lose top spot so one might think we’d just be going through the motions.

There’s no way we’ll be doing that though, because all the guys have so much pride in their performance.

It will really help us having been in this position last year. There’s no doubt 2007 was a bit of a trip into the unknown for us and there was a lot of pressure on us.

We could probably feel that the whole town, while supporting us 100 per cent, was waiting for us to fall over a little bit.

Having been through all that last year we know what it’s like and that’ll definitely help us out this time around.

Still, there’s a few weeks to go before we get to the real business of finals, and first we’re concentrating on the Swans who’ll be tough to beat.

Barry Hall looked in good touch last week and he hasn’t played against us the last couple of times, while Adam Goodes is someone else we’ll probably have to worry about.

There were reports he was a bit injured but he comes back in and kicks eight goals last week, which is a fair effort!

Guys like Harry Taylor and myself will have our hands full with those two guys.

We play the Swans and North Melbourne in the next two weeks and while we haven’t really spoken about it, I’m sure everyone down here knows we might be playing one of those two sides in the first week of the finals.

Obviously we’ll be wanting to put our best foot forward in the next week or two and play really well against those sides.

Hopefully we can just keep going along nicely and keep building towards September.